YouSaid · the spoken record

Ivan Zhao

lines on the record: 81
first: 2025-03-06
most recent: 2025-03-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, actually, I had one of our investors really helpful. Because all those years, you sort of There's no feedback loop. You just go for it, then the feedback loop gradually show up. Then for a while it's, oh, VCs started knocking on doors. So I should talk to those people. The people like what we're doing, right? I did some meetings, quite a few meetings, maybe it doesn't. And one of Immer is saying, like, Avan, what are you doing? Like, you clearly don't need money. You're just trying to feel good to do external validation about this. And I said, oh, that's so true. It's like, I don't, there's. Don't help us make a better product, right? And the truth is with what customers tell us we just went back to building, I went back to hardcore building no meeting modes. That's where the dog food story came about and realized.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because of the way how we just hire someone in the office as a dog, then I think we post on Twitter or something. It's like, why did this show off to our office? Someone really hustle into where we are as our office address. Follow us on Twitter.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think for a while, like okay, once we start revenue product growth faster now, investors start knocking on the door with like, I remember one day like there's a dog food. Dark food center office. So first of all, office wasn't public address and the doctorates, like why do people want this so much? So that was a moment I paused a little bit. I guess there's enough attraction for investors.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think going back to me and Simon, high is never that high lowest never that low. It never hit us as like a binary state. Just kind of like, oh, good, we have people who care about this thing we make now. Oh, good. People reach out to us or paying us. And it's a kind of very gradual ramp. Maybe that's why early days, when it's really the loss eras, it doesn't feel too low because it just even. Notion today, it feels like it's so small in terms of where it could be. They keep going. It's less of a milestone to thinking about things. It's more just like, can we do the same that's in our head and better than we did last week way of thinking about things? So never is there's such movement of product market milestone achieved. Didn't feel that way.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Small talk, one of the first systems, a huge influence for Notion was a really tiny code base. And inspired by Lisp, which is another programming languages, and probably like 100 lines of code or something. The kernel of things could be really small, but just like math, it can compound. It can't have complex behavior that unlocks so much value and things for you. If you just find those right, you can catch up to all the things you did, you are free to lose really quickly. So I think that's the corner of what reset is so powerful.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think Not just like a self help way to say don't be afraid to reset. It's like That's okay, and that's fine. I think the more interesting point here is you can create progress through better abstractions. And that encompasses faster can catch up to all the things you build much quicker than you ever thought. Humans are not thinking, not good at thinking in terms of abstraction or the exponentials. We're thinking in terms of linearly. If you just reset and you find a better way to do it, you can get all the thing you have to sound costs recovered really quickly. Actually going back to the computing pioneers part, like”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're really a cue, almost like a therapist, right? So it's true. You're building too much for your own self and value without realizing at the end of the day, if you're building a product and tool has to be used by others, you need to create a balance. Too much of yourself, then there's no users. You're just doing our project. You're just doing research project, right? And too much for a business, you're building a commodity, right? So where is the spectrum? It's never ending spectrum. That's interesting.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have some taste, you have some aesthetic, you have some values. You want the world to have more of that There are different energy. I realize actually fairly recently, they are really different. Depends on which day I wake up. Am I in different mood for things? But building for value, it's more lasting and more fulfilling. Looking in the thing we're building today and looking back, I find most proud of things like I create something authentic to myself and how happen to be also useful for others. And that just keeps you going. And that feels like a more durable energy source for all those dark years, lost years, their notion, and still every day for me.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of lucky and Simon kind of lucky that high is never too high, low is never too low for us. So somehow it wasn't feeling too down. Whenever I feel down, I just go to sleep. That next day, I'm just reset. So that's kind of lucky for me. Don't be afraid to reset. I think courage is quite important because oftentimes you're working on a thing don't matter, but momentum just took you there. First point of building something you want the world to have. Is the building of product or business? You want user, you want revenue, that's a product business. It's almost like a sports. The market is the arena. Then you'd want to optimize the scorecard as a building for winning. And I grew up playing sports. I like to compete. So I like that. I'm building for something you want the world to have is building for your value.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because me and him working so well now, even back then, it's like you sort of know where you try people are thinking and you can just cross through the problem space really quickly. The technical product space design space and just nonstop of shipping stuff.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we sublease our apartment and office, we're actually making money living in Japan and San Francisco. So we did that for a while. We actually travel around the world for a while just to change that up. Me and Sam just coding every day and design every day. That's some of the happiest moments. Birthday every day.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that was during one of the repeal phases. We know what the product should look like. It should be a productivity software with a Lego power hiding inside of it. We build on the wrong technical foundation. And if we continue to build on the wrong ones, we're going to run out of money. Company won't exist. So we decided to lay off everybody. At that time, Notion was five people. We lay off everybody back to me and Simon, two people. Morale offer yesterday was really low. You have to say goodbye to your teammates. So we have the idea, let's just go somewhere that we've never been to change the scenery a little bit. And Japan is always top on our list. So, you know, the funny thing is.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With car is called notions, it's a lack of free software, it doesn't quite exist, right? There's a Lego for Lego. You can see that in furnitures would exist, but Lego for software at the usable mass market adoption level doesn't quite exist. And you just want that thing to exist. And I grew up with Legos. It's the only toy I ever wanted. And I want the same feeling of creativity and playfulness to the tool that people can use every day. So, and my co-founder, Sam feels the same way. Lego is the only thing he wanted for every Christmas.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chance mom always can help. I'm a single child. Yeah, my mom helped me. Actually, my mom helped me kickstart a company because I'm Canadian in order to move to US, you need to register a company. So my mom helped me with the initial and raise the money and I sort of return the money to her. Then we run out of money. So, hey, mom, can I borrow that just to bridge us, which she did. I'm really grateful for that. How do we bridge? How do you last here so long? Because the thing you want to create does not exist.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 years ago, there's competing before we ran out all the web app runs on React, right? Before React wins, there's a competing technology called Web Component from Google. And it makes sense. Web component feels like a Lego-like the building block like. And we're betting on that technology. And then we realize because it's so new, it's just so unstable. It don't know where the bug comes from. It's from your source code, from the underlying libraries. Then we have to restart the company. Otherwise, rebuild the whole thing. Otherwise, we're going to run out of time. So that's reset the code base, reset the company, so we can build on our own orthodox technology foundation.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true. It took us four years to get somewhere. First two years is that you build too much like a developer product nobody cares. It took us two years to realize we need to build a productivity tool. Then it took another year to build this out. But in the middle of it, I realized we built on the wrong technical foundation.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We call it a sugar called the broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar. So give them the sugar, a hydro broccoli inside of it.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much so because, like, sense of maturation is. You don't see the world just from your perspective, but from outside your perspective, right? It ticks, we were young, Tick has multiple years, it hit your head straight into the water to realize that people just don't care.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's hide our vision, which is everybody can create their software in the form factor that people do care. So, what kind of tool do people use every day? Productivity software. So that's why I came to the notion today if you use Notion are more understood as the productivity suite, but our intent, and we use Notion More, you'll discover intent, which ish has no code developer power into it. You can create almost any kind of productivity software using Notion itself. That took us two plus years to realize. So actually the world is not like you. The world are not developer, designer minded. The world is they only care what's in front of them and it's so noisy.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Costaco is always building a computing tool. It's like, what product is this? It's really hard to shape the product. The vision, the dream is there, but the product is very, there's so many paths. Try many different versions. The first version to take okay, everybody can make and create their software. So let's just build a developer tool that's so easy that more people can do that. We tried that like a couple years and learned that actually most people just don't care. The majority of people, they wake up, they have report due to get their job done, they don't care creating software to optimize whatever they're doing. They don't care. So give to our friends, give it to investors. Yeah, do not resonate with people. We really want to build that tool. So we'll just keep going. And our realization is”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The generation of Steve Jobs and Bill GatesPC personal computing popular. And they sort of stuck with this kind of application framework rather than this small talk object framework. And that has all the apps we have today and has the SaaS brawl we have today.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Auto runs down to the system called Small Talk, which is there's no separation between users and users app. There's no thing called application. Everything is malleable. You can change the tools, right? So when Steve Job, the famous story is when he went to Xerox Park to in demo with the Auto, it's the first time he sees graphic user interface, one of the first time. And they present them with this Alto system that everything could change. But he did not see the power of it. Even when people demonstrate like, hey, Steve Jobs say, I don't like this direction of scroll bar direction. When you scroll up and down, I shouldn't scroll the opposite reverse direction. And then people just instantly change the scroll bar direction for him. That's the power of the original small talk auto system. He only saw the graphic user interface. He did not see the underlying object or the environment power.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What Steve Jobs is actually at fault of this in some strange ways. So the story is like actually the fact, it's not just a story, Xerox Park has working on the first generation personal computer. It's called Xerox Alto. Alan K was one of the main persons behind it.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them, people like Douglas Engelbar, Alan K. Ten Nelson, the first generation pioneers, for them computing, there shouldn't be a separation between builders and users. It's the same medium. AngleBarr's original paper called Augmenting Human Intellect, when I read that paper, it's like, holy shit, if you're making software, if you know how to coward design, this is the highest leverage thing you can do for other people. So giving them the ability to use computing to augment their problem solving ability or their intellect. That just got me obsessed with this problem and I want to start a company like Notion.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, while I was in Canada last year of school working on trying to build a website from our friends and I've created a tool for them. And then you just look into the history of a creative tool for software for computing, eventually arrive at 1960 and 70s. You realize the first generation of computing pioneers, which is around San Francisco, Stanford areas, South Bay, they actually had the best ideas.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's real. I moved to Canada pretty late, 16 years old. And what I learned is, yeah, in China, you can learn English, but it's typically just grammar and doing exams. What you're missing is the context, the culture. So you have to watch SpongeBob or Simpsons to get a sense of humor, essentially. You can't understand jokes, right? Watching cartoon is probably the easiest way to do that.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did not study computer science since I already know how to code, but a lot of video games did a lot of art, actually. Art and science. By the time I graduated college, he realized most of my friends are artists, they need to make their websites, get web portfolio made. And I'm the only nerd in my art friend's circle. So I made three, four websites and realized, oh, actually people don't know how to create with the software medium, computing media. So that got me to want to create a product like Notion today, which is a lot more people to create tools, create software for their daily work and life.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get out of there. I think a small town in China, the definition is actually four million people. It's in the northwest desert part of China. So I grew up there and then I moved into, my mom took me to Beijing, the capital of China. And that's actually how I got into programming, coding, because I'm from somewhere else. And in order to go into good school in the capital, you need to win some kind of competition. And there are different paths. You can go at math or you can get at programming, like information Olympia. I was really into computer games at the time. So of course I picked the programming one. So I can play with computers all day long. And I win some competition and come into a good school. So that's how I got into programming. Later then I moved to Canada. When I moved to Canada, got into college.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pose are extensions of us, and once they extend us, once we shape them, once we bring them to world, they can come back to shape us”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is the building a product or business? One user you want revenue that's a product business. And building for something you want the world to have is building for your value. You have some taste, you have some aesthetic. There are different energy. You need to create a balance. Too much of yourself, then there's no users. You're just doing an art project. And too much for a business. You're building a commodity.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try many different versions. The first version everybody can make and create their software. So let's just build a developer tool that's so easy that more people can do that. We tried that like a couple years and learned that actually most people just don't care. Our realization is actually let's hide our vision, which is everybody can create their software in the form factor that people do care. So what kind of tool do people use every day? Productivity software. It took us two years to realize we need to build a productivity tool. We call it sugar called the broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar. So give them the sugar. I hydro broccoli inside of it.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source